Protesting National's War on the Poor

Today a nationwide protest against the war on the poor and more specifically the cuts to benefits took place outside the WINZ offices in all the major centres. 70 people marched on Paula Bennett's office in Auckland,  Wellington saw 50-60 people protest and Dunedin saw 150 protesters  fighting against cuts to welfare benefits. Other protests occurred throughout the country. 

Unemployment looks set to rise with another recession predicted. The fight for taxes on the rich, more jobs with better pay and decent benefits for people out of work or participating in unpaid work such as childcare is increasingly important.

Blaming beneficiaries for the failures of the economic system is all to easy for this right-wing government, whose tactics have changed little since the 1990s.

In 1959 the official unemployment was 21. That’s 21 people not 21 percent. It was joked that the prime minister knew every unemployed person by name. But as the post-war boom ended, the nature of capitalism began to take hold again, the rot of recession set in, and unemployment began to rise. Since the global recession in 2008, 160,000 people are unemployed and 100,000 or more people are underemployed.

The government would have us believe that between 1959 and 2012 an epidemic of laziness swept the nation and hundreds of thousands of people became lazy bludgers, as Mike Treen, of Unite Union, puts it “some mass laziness psychosis that made us all quit our jobs and go on the dole.”

As unemployment began to rise in the 90s, so did the attacks on beneficiaries and workers. These included “dob-in-your-neighbour'' adverts for beneficiary fraud and the idea of inter-generational “bludging”. This is the same anti-working class rhetoric we hear today. It blames individuals and not the system that produces poverty and inequality. The benefit cuts in the 1990s coincided with the smashing of unions by the Employment Contracts Act, which contributed greatly to low wages and unemployment.

Official unemployment is 6.8% now. That number represents the people who in the past four weeks have been looking for work. The actual rate of unemployment is likely to be a lot higher because the unemployed who are not counted include those who have given up looking for work and those who are jobless but don’t collect the dole. Further, you are only counted as unemployed if in the survey period you didn't work at all – not even one hour, unpaid. You are not counted as unemployed if you are too ill or in training.

“There is a broader measure of unemployment called the “jobless” that is a more accurate measure of actual unemployment in society. The Jobless number is usually nearly twice the official unemployment figure.” (Mike Treen Exposing Right Wing Lies)

As “unofficial unemployment” steadily rises, the government is pushing people back out into the labour market for ghost jobs - there actually 2000 fewer jobs from March to June this year.

Benefit cuts are only the half of it. The war on the poor includes cuts at Housing NZ, the Family Court, and the Ministry of Social Development. Funding is being restricted to social services in a country where hardship rates rose from 15% in 2007 to 21% in 2011.

Why cut welfare? 

"Firstly, benefits above the barest minimum are seen as a barrier to lowering wages.  The costs of welfare are also seen as a barrier to the government’s program of cutting taxes on business and the rich. Cutting social welfare and cutting taxes for the rich usually go hand in hand." Mike Treen Exposing Right Wing Lies.

Funnily enough, as predicted, National cut taxes to the rich by 3%, as we saw the formation of the Welfare Working Group. By cutting benefits and punishing people for not looking for work in an environment of decreasing levels of jobs, big business can decrease the wage rate as people accept lower wages so not to starve.

Keeping welfare high keeps people spending and less desperate for work in times of recession, thus keeping wages higher.

Fighting for the wellbeing of those on welfare is fighting for the wellbeing of all workers. This is why these battles are so important. Capitalist rhetoric, which claims workers are paying for the lazy lifestyle of beneficiaries, serves to divide the employed and unemployed. As unemployment rises and more workers are laid off, expect to see more persistent propaganda spreading these lies. This protest is just the beginning, but to win this battle we must draw in workers and unions to support it, hitting the capitalists where it hurts the most; in their pockets.

The resistance around the world to austerity measures is growing. The Greek working class recently organised a 48-hour general strike and has been struggling against austerity in the workplace and on the streets for years. In the last week, Spain has seen mass protests against fiscal cuts and the last year's Egyptian revolution and the Arab Spring give us hope that internationally the tide may be turning in our favour.

To win any justice for beneficiaries we must build a fight back to the system which causes unemployment in the first place. We need to look toward a militant movement of striking workers alongside organised unemployed people as a force that could seriously challenge the governments agenda. This is fair way off and at the moment we need to build the small protest movements and support workers when they are on strike like we've seen at the Ports of Auckland, Oceania Rest Homes and Affco.

Rowan MacArthur

Remembering Eric Hobsbawm

Ian Birchall looks back on the life of Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who has died aged 95

Eric Hobsbawm, who died on Monday of this week was one of the most remarkable historians of the 20th century.

After a childhood in Vienna, he moved with his family to Berlin. Recently he wrote a vivid account of his recollections of life in Germany before Hitler took over. He was already a Communist by that point, with a duplicating machine hidden under his bed.

The family moved to Britain (his father was British) and he studied at Cambridge university. But though he remained in Britain for the rest of his life, he was marked by his early experiences.

Hobsbawm wrote many years later of his experience as a refugee. He said this made him “still vaguely uneasy if I don’t possess a valid passport and enough cash to transport me to the nearest suitable country at short notice.”

He added that he could “understand the situation” of Kenyan Asian refugees in the 1970s. He felt “horrified by British immigration officials in a more profound and visceral way than those for whom the question is primarily one of equal rights and civil liberty in general”.

From 1947 Hobsbawm held a post at Birkbeck College in London. In academic terms he was a great success. He authored many books and articles with an international reputation.

But Hobsbawm was quite different from typical academic historians. They bury themselves in their specialist “period” and remain ignorant of the rest of human history (and even more ignorant of the world they live in).

The range of Hobsbawm’s work is extraordinary—from 17th century feudal society to Peruvian land occupations and secret societies in early 19th century Europe.

His four books Age of Revolution, Age of Capital, Age of Empire and Age of Extremes cover the history of the world from the storming of the Bastille to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Any reader will be rewarded with a wealth of information.

Scholarly

Yet Hobsbawm never believed that history belonged to historians. As well as scholarly books and articles, he wrote innumerable articles for the Guardian, New Statesman, London Review of Books and other publications.

In contrast to many celebrity historians, Hobsbawm didn’t exploit his academic status to shout his mouth off over things he knew nothing.

He believed history could help us to understand the present and shape the future. So arguments based on history were relevant to an audience far wider than professional students of the subject.

Hobsbawm also had a second identity. As jazz critic Francis Newton he wrote for the New Statesman at a time when US culture was suspect in Communist circles. However—as with many of his generation—rock and roll was a bit too much for his tastes.

Eric Hobsbawm was a lifelong Communist who joined Britain’s Communist Party in 1936. He remained a member until the party’s collapse in 1991. In recent years this has been used systematically by right wing critics to discredit his historical work.

At the 2008 Tory party conference Michael Gove—now education secretary—stated that “only when Hobsbawm weeps hot tears for a life spent serving an ideology of wickedness will he ever be worth listening to”. We shall of course wait far longer than that before Gove says anything worth listening to.

Childish smears of this sort may be disregarded. But a real problem remains.

Hobsbawm’s Communist commitment and his admiration for Marx provided much that was positive in his historical work. It gave him an understanding of the economic base of society and a grasp of class relations. But his loyalty to the Stalinist current of Communism also had negative effects.

His early encounter with fascism left Hobsbawm convinced that the only strategy to fight fascism was the “popular front”—an alliance between the workers’ movement and pro-capitalist parties.

Wedded

In France and Spain in the 1930s this strategy blocked revolutionary possibilities and opened the way for the victory of fascism. But Hobsbawm remained wedded to the popular front strategy for the rest of his life.

Sometimes this affected his work. He had a tendency to underestimate the high points of working class activity. Thus his book Age of Capital dismisses the 1871 Paris Commune—which for Karl Marx was one of the greatest achievements of the working class—in a few short paragraphs.

In 1956 Hobsbawm approved “with a heavy heart” the Russian suppression of the Hungarian revolution. While many of the Communist Party’s best known historians—EP Thompson, Christopher Hill—left the party, Hobsbawm stayed.

As late as 2006 he was still insisting, in an exchange with Chris Harman and myself in the London Review of Books, that the Hungarian workers’ councils were not a “major factor” in the revolution. That contradicted the reports of many participants and observers.

Briefly in the 1960s he seemed impressed by a new wave of radicalism. He spoke at the first Vietnam teach-in at Oxford, organised by the new revolutionary left, including Peter Binns and Tariq Ali.

In 1968 he wrote for the new revolutionary paper Black Dwarf. He described the French general strike as “marvellous and enchanting” and accused the French Communist Party of “feet dragging”. But soon he swung back to his roots.

His most important political intervention was his 1978 lecture The Forward March of Labour Halted. He argued that industrial militancy was not particularly relevant to the struggle for socialism.

“Straightforward, economist trade union consciousness may at times actually set workers against each other rather than establish wider patterns of solidarity,” he wrote.

Challenged

Four years later he openly challenged the Marxist view of the historical role of the working class. “The manual working class, core of traditional socialist labour parties, is today contracting and not expanding.

“It has been transformed, and to some extent divided, by the decades when its standard of living reached levels undreamed of even by the well-paid in 1939.

“It can no longer be assumed that all workers are on the way to recognising that their class situation must align them behind a socialist workers party, though there are still many millions who believe this.”

Hobsbawm seemed to limit the term “working class” to one specific phase of history, without recognising the development of a new type of working class.

His argument helped to foment the dispute between open reformists (known as “Eurocommunists”) and unrepentant Stalinists that finally destroyed the Communist Party.

But the impact of his views went far beyond Communist ranks. At the 1982 Labour Party conference then leader Neil Kinnock praised Hobsbawm as “the most sagacious living Marxist”. Hobsbawm’s argument against industrial militancy suited Kinnock’s desire to shift the Labour Party to the right.

In later years Hobsbawm became more and more critical of Russian-style “socialism”. In Age of Extremes he described Russia as having had “a dead end economy and a political system for which there was nothing to be said”.

But while seeing the evils of capitalism, he seemed to have little idea of what might replace it. In 2007’s Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism he said we were entering a new phase of history but that “we do not know where we are going”.

Yet Hobsbawm never quite lost the spirit that made him a Communist in the first place. In 2008, now far too old to bother about academic language, Hobsbawm prophesiedthat there would be more “nationalist stuff” in English history.

He added that “the whole function of history is precisely to be a pain in the arse for national myths”.

There is much to criticise in Hobsbawm’s work. But there’s also a great deal that will continue to be a “pain in the arse” for the likes of Michael Gove.

[This obituary was first published at Socialist Worker UK]

ANZUS? No going back

[Mass protests forced a nuclear-free policy on Lange. We need to rediscover this tradition.]

There was a flurry of news recently about the US and NZ building “better relations” as Leon Panetta, the US secretary of Defence, visited the country. There hasn’t been such a visit since NZ was suspended from the ANZUS military agreement because of the ban on nuclear warships docking in NZ ports. Panetta wants to station US troops in NZ.

Whenever there is discussion about ‘better military relations’ we must wonder who will these relations be better for? Will closer military relations benefit working people or will it benefit the wealthy?

The New Zealand capitalists want closer relations with the USA for, as I see it, two main reasons. First there is the access to trade deals and other economic benefits from the plunder of the Middle East and other imperial exploits. For resources such as cheap labour and raw materials and access to markets to sell goods there is a section of the NZ elite that supported the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. Can anyone remember Don Brash or John Key talking about how ‘we’ should have joined the invasion of Iraq to get better ‘trade deals’. These so called ‘Free Trade’ deals, like the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement will mean the continued race to the bottom in terms of wages and conditions for workers in all countries.

The second reason capitalists in New Zealand support a return to ANZUS is that it would tighten up the already strong economic and political alliance in the pacific that is in competition with China. Ever since the end of World War Two the USA and its allies like Australia and New Zealand have dominated the Pacific. This is more than simply economic exploitation to Military interventions. Troops and police have been sent to Tonga in 2006 and the Solomons in 2003 under Helen Clark’s Labour government to prop up corrupt governments that protect the profits of NZ, Aus, and US corporations.

['Why, I can smile; and murder while I smile']

China is a growing threat to this political bloc in the Pacific. While it is one of NZ’s, the USA, and Australia’s biggest trading partners there is a political tension growing between the US led countries and China. In the pacific the most glaring case of political tension is over Fiji. However in many places, including NZ, there is competition between Chinese investment and aid and western investment and aid – where both groups are trying to buy influence. It is unlikely that any open conflict in the Pacific will erupt any time soon especially since the US and NATO forces are still continuing the predatory occupation of Afghanistan. Even this being the case it would be a big step backwards for working people, in China, the USA, and NZ for NZ to re – enter ANZUS.

Nuclear armed and powered warships (or warships of any kind) can only benefit the capitalists by providing them strategic advantage over their competitors in other countries. Working people, students, and the oppressed should reject any appeals that say we need ‘defence’.  It was ordinary people that put the pressure on the government and business community to ban all nuclear powered or armed warships.  Above all it was the wharfies on the ports in NZ that forced the government’s hand. There was a campaign of strike action that escalated to the point where the workers would shut down the ports whenever a US warship docked. This is the kind of power that can defend ordinary people from the horrors of war abroad and poverty at home. We should look to building a stronger workers movement that has international links with the workers movement in both China and the USA/Aus.

If we want to stop the wars around the world or any conflict between ANZUS and China in the Pacific then we must understand that these alliances and wars are for profit. There is no benefit for working people in military alliances of any kind as the old saying goes: It’s the rich who start wars and the poor who die in them.

 Derwin Smith

In memory of Alison Stoddart

We were horrified to learn of the loss of Alison Stoddart (1980 - 2012), a fighter against injustice and oppression gone much too soon. Our thoughts are with all of her family and friends.

Alison came from a family with a long history of activism and campaigning in Dunedin. Her granny, Christina, travels to Palestine regularly in solidarity work with the Society of Friends, while her mother has worked in campaigns over everything from criminal injustice to the environment to beneficiaries’ rights.

Alison was, briefly, a member of our organization at the end of the 1990s. Political differences, and time in the UK, convinced her that she disagreed with our Leninism, but she stayed for the rest of her life a passionate supporter of socialist politics. Alison was a regular at all the major protests and demonstrations in Dunedin, and played and important part in mobilizing for the protests against the Iraq war and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that took place during the 2000s.

Her attitude towards our organization was always comradely and intensely engaged. She had comments and criticisms on every magazine or pamphlet we produced: for a tiny group like ours, these criticisms meant a huge amount - she took our ideas seriously enough to argue with them, and to demand better from us. Her constructive engagement gestured at exactly the kind of world we hoped to build.

Politics were central to her life. She was arrested protesting against nuclear submarines at Faslane in Scotland during her OE; as a teenager she built demonstrations and direct action against French nuclear testing in Mururoa Atol. Two more personal memories: as school students we heckled the Tory scum Jenny Shipley when she made an unwise attempt at a walkabout in Dunedin one afternoon in 1998; my first sit-down protest was with Alison as unions responded to Max Bradford's attacks on holidays. More recently we have spent many hours over the phone debating the Mana Movement's prospects and problems.

For many of us Alison was a dear personal friend; for the rest of our organization she was a comrade and fellow fighter. The way she lived her life demonstrates what makes the victory of working-class politics essential: she lived a life of unsentimental solidarity, connection with the weak and oppressed, union politics, and anti-capitalist energy. Alison hated the capitalist system, and was disgusted at the lies of Paula Bennett and others slandering beneficiaries and working women.

We honour her memory by building an organization that can fight capitalism and oppression in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Ah, how good to sense the first awakening flicker of

muscularity in the trees' arms. Indeed, how magical they seem in the

street lights with spring fuzz bursting all over and thinning

to delicate twigs - scratch marks in a bland sky.

(Hone Tuwhare, "Street March and Demonstration, Dunedin, 14th October 1977")

Dougal McNeill

(for the National Committee, International Socialist Organisation NZ)

The Significance of the 1912 Waihi Strike 1912 - 2012

This year marks the centenary of the 1912 Waihi miners' strike, one of the most important - and violently contested - strikes in New Zealand history. Frederick Evans was matyred; political ideas and organisational questions clarified; and the role and force of the state made clear. The strike offers many lessons for today.

To mark the occasion, we have published a new pamphlet, The Significance of the 1912 Waihi Strike. This pamphlet aims to introduce the story of the strike to a new generation of unionists and activists, and to draw out its political significance.

You can order copies for $5 by emailing (internationalsocialistsnz [at] gmail.com) or by writing to ISO, PO Box 6157, Dunedin.

Pamphlet Launch

We will launch the pamphlet on Tuesday 25th September at 6pm in the Student Union Building, Victoria University Wellington. The author, Martin Gregory, will speak on the significance of the Waihi Strike and there will copies available to purchase.


The Significance of the Waihi Strike
by Martin Gregory
International Socialist Organisation
(ISBN 978-0-473-22214-7)

Rebellion of the Rank and File

On 17 September a joint-union stopwork meeting of Auckland bus drivers voted against their union leaders’ recommendation to accept the latest NZ Bus offer. Unless a concession is made Auckland’s 800 bus drivers will be on strike next Monday, and plan to strike every Monday for weeks if necessary.

NZ Bus is owned by Infratil, one of those multinational vulture capitalist corporations that have fed off the privatisation of formerly publicly owned services. Only a month ago Infratil posted an annual profit of $127 million, up 6%. If they gave the Auckland drivers a $10,000 pay rise it would only cost $8m.

Why were the First Union and Tramways Union leaders recommending a deal that leaves the drivers being paid under $20 an hour, having to work 14 hour split shifts for 8 hours pay, and only getting time and a quarter for overtime? The top union leaders have egg on their faces, the penalty for not having more faith in the ordinary union member. It should be mentioned that the CTU President Helen Kelly “helped” with the negotiations.

The CTU are backing the Living Wage campaign. If the dealings with NZ Bus are anything to go by, this evidently doesn’t mean calling on unionists to take the employers on. The Living Wage campaign is a copycat from the UK. It’s a faith-based campaign; worthy, but of no use. The only people that can win living wages are workers themselves, through finding their strength in the workplace.

In 1906 the Auckland tram drivers went on strike illegally in defiance of the anti-strike the 1894 Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act. They were the first workers to do so.  It would be a delicious case of history repeating itself if the Auckland drivers’ set the trend again by showing how to really fight for a living wage.

Martin Gregory 

Hey John Key - Taihoa!

The Waitangi Tribunal has told John Key to “taihoa” - to wait a little with his plans to privatise state owned electricity companies.

Key thought he could sell the companies after he won the election but the Maori Council has thrown a spanner in the works by putting in a claim for freshwater.

A hydro dam is pretty useless without water to drive it.

Even before Key suggested privatising the hydro companies, Maori had put in claims for rights to freshwater but the privatisation plans forced the Maori Council's hand.

If the dams are privatised, the chance of Maori getting any acknowledgement or compensation from the private companies will disappear. The “mum and dad investors” (in other words a small minority of wealthy New Zealanders) will instead reap the benefits of the rivers.

The Tribunal said Maori obviously used the lakes and rivers before colonisation, and so they have rights that are best translated into an English legal definition as ownership.

“We agree that the claimants' evidence has demonstrated the customary 'indicia' of ownership and that 'full-blown' ownership of property in the English sense was the closest legal equivalent for Maori customary rights in 1840,” the Tribunal report said.

This is an interim report, but the Tribunal is unlikely to change its mind on this fundamental point.
So, is this good, bad or indifferent for working people?

For a start, it has slowed down the privatisation and created debate, which is good.
If iwi swap their opposition to privatisation for shares and a seat on the board, it will bad because it will allow privatisation to go ahead, but better than if Maori got no compensation.

Socialists should support the Maori struggle for justice and self-determination. We have to commit 100% to the struggle against more than a century of colonialism. This means supporting compensation for historical grievances even when it is plain to see the main winners from settlements will be iwi corporates. 

That does not mean being uncritical. The corporate strategy is just one, very risky, strategy. Most settlements are in the form of ownership – and what is owned can be sold. As the whole of NZ is finding out, our assets can be sold against our will. The same goes for iwi assets. 

Private property in the form of market commodities is not the only model. The power companies should be run in the interests of human need, not profit, by:

1) the people who actually go to work everyday to keep NZ humming.

2) representatives of power consumers.

3) representatives of iwi.

Andrew Tait